The Last Utopia Human Rights in History Samuel Moyn The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2010 Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moyn, Samuel. The last utopia : human rights in history / Samuel Moyn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04872-0 (alk. paper) 1. Human rights—History. I. Title. JC571.M88 2010 323.09—dc22 2010012998 Contents Prologue 1 1 Humanity before Human Rights 11 2 Death from Birth 44 3 Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement 84 4 The Purity of This Struggle 120 5 International Law and Human Rights 176 Epilogue: The Burden of Morality 212 Appendixes 231 Notes 241 Bibliographical Essay 311 Acknowledgments 323 Index 327 The Last Utopia Prologue When people hear the phrase “human rights,” they think of the highest moral precepts and political ideals. And they are right to do so. They have in mind a familiar set of indispensable lib- eral freedoms, and sometimes more expansive principles of social protection. But they also mean something more. The phrase implies an agenda for improving the world, and bringing about a new one in which the dignity of each individual will enjoy secure international protection. It is a recognizably utopian program: for the political standards it champions and the emotional passion it inspires, this program draws on the image of a place that has not yet been called into being. It promises to penetrate the impregnability of state bor- ders, slowly replacing them with the authority of international law. It prides itself on offering victims the world over the possibility of a better life. It pledges to do so by working in alliance with states when possible, but naming and shaming them when they violate the most basic norms. Human rights in this sense have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political en- tities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action. It is striking to register how recently this program became wide- spread. Over the course of the 1970s, the moral world of Westerners shifted, opening a space for the sort of utopianism that coalesced in an international human rights movement that had never existed be- fore. The eternal rights of man were proclaimed in the era of Enlight- enment, but they were so profoundly different in their practical out- comes—up to and including bloody revolution—as to constitute THE LAST UTOPIA 2 another conception altogether. In 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, a Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed. But it was less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes. The world looked up for a mo- ment. Then it resumed its postwar agendas, which had crystallized in the same years that the United Nations—which sponsored the decla- ration—emerged. The priority fell on victory of one or the other of the two global Cold War visions for America, the Soviet Union, and the European continent they were dividing between them. And the struggle for the decolonization of empire made the Cold War com- petition global, even if some new states strove to find some exit from the Cold War rivalry to chart their own course. The United States, which had driven the inflation of global hopes during World War II for a new order after it, and introduced the idea of “human rights” into minor circulation, soon dropped the phrase. And both the So- viet Union and anticolonialist forces were more committed to collec- tive ideals of emancipation—communism and nationalism—as the path into the future, not individual rights directly, or their enshrine- ment in international law. Even in 1968, which the UN declared “International Human Rights Year,” such rights remained peripheral as an organizing con- cept and almost nonexistent as a movement. The UN organized a twentieth-anniversary conference in Tehran, Iran, to remember and revive stillborn principles. It was an extraordinary scene. The dicta- torial shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, opened the spring conference by crediting his ancient countrymen with the discovery of human rights: the tradition of the great Persian emperor Cyrus of more than a millennium before, the shah asserted, had now found fulfillment in his own dynasty’s respect for moral principle. The meetings that fol- lowed, chaired by his sister Princess Ashraf, brought to the fore an in- terpretation of human rights altogether unrecognizable now: the lib- eration of nations formerly under imperial rule was presented as the most significant achievement so far, the outcome of the long march of human rights, and the model for what had yet to be accom- Prologue 3 plished—not least in Israel, which received withering attention in the proceedings, due to its acquisitions after the Six Day War against its Arab neighbors. Yet outside the UN in 1968, human rights had not yet become a powerful set of ideals, and this fact is more crucial than anything that went on at the shah’s staged event.1 As the conference went through its scripted motions, the real world was exploding in revolt. May 1968 brought to Paris its greatest postwar upheaval, with students and workers shutting the country down and demanding an end to middle-class compromises. In far-flung spots around the globe, from Eastern Europe to China, and across the United States, from Berkeley to New York, people—especially young people— demanded change. But outside Tehran, no one in the global disrup- tion of 1968 thought of the better world they demanded as a world to be governed by “human rights.” The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere. If the Soviet Union had generally lost credibility (and America’s Vietnamese adventure invited so much international outrage), human rights were not the immediate ben- eficiaries. During the 1960s crisis of superpower order, other utopian visions prospered. They called for community at home, redeeming the United States from hollow consumerism, or “socialism with a human face” in the Soviet empire, or further liberation from a so- called neocolonialism in the third world. At the time, there were next to no nongovernmental organizations that pursued human rights; Amnesty International, a fledging group, remained practically un- known. From the 1940s until 1968, the few NGOs that did view hu- man rights as part of their mission struggled for them within the UN’s framework, but the conference in Tehran confirmed the ago- nizing fruitlessness of this project. One longtime NGO chief, Moses Moskowitz, observed bitterly in the aftermath of the conference that the human rights idea had “yet to arouse the curiosity of the intellec- tual, to stir the imagination of the social and political reformer and to evoke the emotional response of the moralist.”2 He was right. Yet, within one decade, human rights would begin to be invoked THE LAST UTOPIA 4 across the developed world and by many more ordinary people than ever before. Instead of implying colonial liberation and the creation of emancipated nations, human rights most often now meant indi- vidual protection against the state. Amnesty International became newly visible and, as a beacon of new ideals, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its work. The popularity of its new mode of advo- cacy forever transformed what it meant to agitate for humane causes, and spawned a new brand and age of internationalist citizen ad- vocacy. Westerners left the dream of revolution behind—both for themselves and for the third world they had once ruled—and adopted other tactics, envisioning an international law of human rights as the steward of utopian norms, and as the mechanism of their fulfillment. Even politicians, most notably American president Jimmy Carter, started to invoke human rights as the guiding ratio- nale of the foreign policy of states. And most visibly of all, the public relevance of human rights skyrocketed, as measured by the simple presence of the phrase in the newspaper, ushering in the current su- premacy of human rights. Having been almost never used in English prior to the 1940s, when they experienced only a modest increase, the words “human rights” were printed in 1977 in the New York Times nearly five times as often as in any prior year in that publication’s his- tory. The moral world had changed. “People think of history in the long term,” Philip Roth says in one of his novels, “but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.”3 Never has this been truer than when it comes to the history of human rights. There is no way to reckon with the recent emergence and con- temporary power of human rights without focusing on their utopian dimension: the image of another, better world of dignity and respect that underlies their appeal, even when human rights seem to be about slow and piecemeal reform. But far from being the sole ideal- ism that has inspired faith and activism in the course of human events, human rights emerged historically as the last utopia—one that became powerful and prominent because other visions im- ploded. Human rights are only a particular modern version of the Prologue 5 ancient commitment by Plato and Deuteronomy—and Cyrus—to the cause of justice. Even among modern schemes of freedom and equality, they are only one among others; they were far from the first to make humanity’s global aspirations the central focus.